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Oyster Crabs with Poached Eggs
Cook oyster crabs in butter. Cut bread in slices, shape with doughnut cutter, toast, butter, and place in buttered ramekin dishes, fill the rings with cooked crabs, break an egg on top of each, sprinkle with grated cheese, and bake ten to twelve minutes.
A short entrée from the era when oyster crabs turned up free inside the shell and were treated as a delicacy in their own right. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no quantities, so both need filling in.
- Oyster crabsThese are Pinnotheres ostreum, the soft, pea-sized crabs that live commensally inside oysters and were once shucked out by the pint at oyster houses. They are almost impossible to buy now; a fishmonger who shucks in-house may save them for you. Tiny cooked bay shrimp or picked crabmeat stand in for texture, though not for the flavour.
- They cook in secondsThey cook very fast -- Whole oyster crabs are eaten shell, meat and all, and a brief turn in butter over medium heat, a minute or two, is enough. Longer cooking is likely to toughen the shells. Do not brown them hard before they go into the dish, since they get another ten minutes in the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. For eggs baked in ramekins, a moderate oven of about 375F suits the stated ten to twelve minutes, setting the white while leaving the yolk soft; a hotter oven risks toughening the white before the yolk is warmed through.
- The bread ringA doughnut cutter gives a ring of toast that sits in the bottom of the ramekin and holds the crabs in place under the egg, so the whole thing lifts out in one piece. Any two nested round cutters do the same job. Cut the bread about a half inch thick so the ring keeps its shape once buttered.
- Ramekin dishesIn a book of 1907, 'ramekin' generally meant a small individual dish for baked entrees; surviving examples are often shallower than the deep souffle cups sold under the name today. A shallow 4-inch gratin dish is probably closer to what was meant, and it lets the egg set evenly.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" in an American book of this date usually means a dry aged cheddar or a hard grating cheese. Use a light hand: a tablespoon per dish is enough to brown, and more will weep fat over the egg.
- YieldOne ramekin per person as a first course. Figure roughly a quarter cup of cooked crabs and one egg for each, with buttered toast alongside.
Oyster crabs were a genuine luxury of the American oyster trade rather than a substitute for anything: the pale, thin-shelled little crabs found sheltering in the mantle of an oyster were picked out during shucking, sold in oyster houses, and served fried, in cream, or as a garnish. Diamond Jim Brady's fondness for them is part of the standing lore of the period. Their appearance in a Lowney's book is a reminder that the volume was a general household cookbook underwritten by a chocolate company rather than a chocolate manual, and that its entrée chapter reflects the hotel and club cooking of the 1900s. Supplies dwindled as the wild oyster beds of the mid-Atlantic declined through the twentieth century, and the dish went with them.